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112 - Antoine Jebara -Driving MSP Success Through Shared Vision and Innovation · Partnerships Unraveled

• 0:07
  Speaker 2: Welcome back to Partnerships Unraveled, the podcast where we unravel the mysteries about partnerships and channel on a weekly basis.
• 0:13
  Speaker 2: My name is Alex Whitford, I'm the VP of Revenue here at Chanix and this week I'm very excited to welcome our special guest, antoine.
• 0:19
  Speaker 2: How are you doing?
• 0:20
  Speaker 2: I'm doing okay.
• 0:21
  Speaker 2: How are you, alex?
• 0:22
  Speaker 2: I'm doing really well.
• 0:23
  Speaker 2: I always joke with the audience.
• 0:26
  Speaker 2: That it's my favorite part of the week recording the podcast.
• 0:29
  Speaker 2: Maybe for the uninitiated, it'd be great if you could give us a little bit of a rundown of who you are and where you come from.
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: Yeah, my name is Antoine Jabara.
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: I'm one of the co-founders of JumpCloud and the GM of our MSP business, and JumpCloud is an open directory platform that allows MSPs to unify identity, access and device management capabilities under a single platform, regardless of the operating system that is being managed or the authentication method that's being used.
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: A better way to think about it is you have end users that are joining the end users that are joining the companies of your end clients.
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: These users are going to need a device, and that device is going to need to be able to give them access to any type of local applications, cloud applications, networked resources and the devices themselves.
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: Jumpcloud streamlines all of that, so it's a single pane of glass for the end user, where they authenticate once and once they're in, they have access to all of the resources that they need to do their job.
• 1:32
  Speaker 2: Now, Antoine, the reason we're really speaking today is as a founder.
• 1:36
  Speaker 2: You decided to build a channel strategy, right.
• 1:39
  Speaker 2: You decided to start working with MSPs, rather than what so many founders choose, which is to sell directly.
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: I'd love to understand how you made that decision.
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean our partners.
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: They play a key role in our growth strategy.
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: They allow us to reach companies that would otherwise be hard to reach directly.
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: They also support us in selling complex deals deals.
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: They allow us to unlock new markets and increase our reach in countries where we might be dealing with local language that we don't have jump cloudians that speak, or with local currency or a local complex operating model.
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: So, like, I mean our partners.
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: As I mentioned, they play a key role in our growth.
• 2:20
  Speaker 2: They allow us to do all of these things and that's why we invest heavily in our partner program and our partner strategy excellent that we are certainly fans in terms of why channel is important and I think one of the things that it is that sort of customization and localization, which I think wildly, maybe a sort of of British or American mindset, right, hey, we'll just do it all in English and I'm sure it'll work, but from your experience you've seen that localization really plays a sort of critical role in how you expand.
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: Absolutely.
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: I mean, there's a lot of countries around the world where you can do business in English and there's some where you cannot.
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: It's just not the preferred language.
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: You're at a disadvantage and, at the end of the day, you need to be able to provide your end clients with what they're looking for, right, and if it's support for their local language, support for doing business in a certain currency or operating a certain way under certain local laws, that's where our partners can play an invaluable role in helping us grow yeah, I think the the operative word there is disadvantage, right, I?
• 3:32
  Speaker 2: I hear so often and in chanix world we we talk a lot about marketing and demand generation from a vendor and a partner perspective and I'll often hear, yeah, but you know, most french people speak english and I'm like true, however, you're at a disadvantage.
• 3:47
  Speaker 2: You're at a disadvantage to every other piece of content out there that's in local language, or you're at a disadvantage to your competitor.
• 3:53
  Speaker 2: You've introduced all this competition in terms of the MSPs who are selling a competitive solution, but they also have the localization, the local language, the relationships and everything else.
• 4:11
  Speaker 2: That sort of goes around that.
• 4:12
  Speaker 2: Maybe you can talk to an example where you've seen that local customization really play a differentiating factor to jump cloud success in that region.
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean.
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: So we're now operating.
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: We have customers and partners in 160 different countries.
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: Right, we don't have.
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: We have drum cloudians in many, many countries 17 countries, I think, upwards of 17 countries at this point but we can't be in all 160.
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: There's certain markets that might be small or large, where you cannot do things the same way you'd operate in another region.
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: An example, for example, is Brazil, where, speaking in Portuguese, spending a lot of time around building communities on WhatsApp and on other platforms and in person, operating in an environment where you have a very complex tax system and companies expect to operate a certain way.
• 5:09
  Speaker 1: All of these things are very hard things to do in English when you're not actually operating in the country.
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: And this is where we have some amazing partners in Brazil that are able to help us bridge that gap and really spread that awareness of JumpCloud in that market and represent us in this market, allowing us to show companies the value that we provide and helping them adopt some of these core components that we offer.
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: That allows them to take their business to the next level.
• 5:40
  Speaker 2: What I love there is in a full answer.
• 5:45
  Speaker 2: You've told us around what customer obsession is right, which is, hey, we're working back from what the customer needs, or what the partner needs for them to truly be successful.
• 5:53
  Speaker 2: And I constantly have senior leaders on and they all tell me the same thing, and yet so many businesses miss it, which is the customers have the answer right.
• 6:02
  Speaker 2: We spend a lot of time building strategy and thinking really creative solutions, but very often the easiest thing is, hey, just go and speak to them and they'll tell you how has working with MSPs and collecting feedback from them shaped your product.
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: I mean MSPs, or MSPs tend to go really deep into the product, right, because they are managing multiple environments for their clients.
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: Every client is different, so they touch different areas of the platform and they end up being extremely knowledgeable about the platform.
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: They create tons of feature requests, they join our roadmap webinars, our partner advisory board, the fireside chats and within these different forums or medium, they're able to share a lot of the learnings, a lot of the opportunities that they're seeing in the market for us to continue improving our platform.
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: These can be extremely granular, when we're talking about a subset of a subset of a feature, or they can be extremely macro where they're talking about the ease of managing multiple tenants from within a single pane of glass in the context of doing this.
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: So I would say that over the years, our MSPs have helped us tremendously shape the direction that our product has decided to adopt and they're going to continue to do so in the years to come.
• 7:17
  Speaker 2: One of the things I find really interesting from a customer obsession feedback perspective, it sounds like they've had a tremendous impact on your product direction as a senior leader.
• 7:27
  Speaker 2: How do you foster the culture that asks those msps for feedback and then, most importantly, actually listen and use it?
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: I think that there's two parts to this.
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: The first part is around having the mechanisms in place, like like the forums in place to be able to support this, and I touched on this a second ago around our product roadmap webinars, our fireside chats, our partner advisory board, our in-person roadshows All of these are forums that allow us to have these conversations.
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: That's one part.
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: The second part, I think, is building strong connections with our partners and not adopting a transactional view on how you're going to run your partner network, and that takes a lot of time and is awesome to have once you've built Because once you've spent the time and have built relationships, know your partners, they know you, you're transparent with them, they're transparent, transparent with you then you can have honest conversations about where we're at the moment and where we want to go, and the combination of these two things, where you have the uh, the, the mediums or the channels for to have these conversations, and then you have the relationships and the trust to be able to have these meaningful conversations.
• 8:44
  Speaker 1: This is when it all comes together.
• 8:46
  Speaker 2: And I imagine that trust is really sort of solidified when an MSP said, hey, this feature doesn't work or I want it to work this way and the button should be red not green.
• 8:56
  Speaker 2: When they actually see that acted on right and they see those changes, I think that sort of reciprocity that's going to feed back into your channel and that's really what gains loyalty, right, yeah.
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I think so, and I think that it's less of a per-feature type of system that reinforces the system, and we're going to be very transparent with you.
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: This is what we're going to be spending our time doing the next year.
• 9:24
  Speaker 1: This is your feedback over the last year.
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: There's some that's in it, some that's outside of it.
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: How do you feel about it?
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: There's some that's in it, some that's outside of it.
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: How do you feel about it?
• 9:34
  Speaker 1: Let's try to figure out in general, like we'd like your feedback as we're solidifying our roadmap for the coming years, and in a lot of cases, we find that we've done a great job at incorporating all of the feedback stack, ranking the priorities and running with them.
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: In other cases, we get feedback along the way which helps us refine our roadmap, and I think it's that dynamic.
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: Once you have that dynamic in place, you get into a zone where you really have trust and your partners know that whatever you're building they know is going to be best for the partnership longer term.
• 10:14
  Speaker 2: I think once you've taken all that feedback and that's helped drive your product, that adds complexity right and I think, especially in the security world, which can be a very complex product portfolio, how do you drive enablement for both sort of engineering resources within MSP, so they're able to successfully deploy and manage your solution, but also sales teams so they're actually able to talk about it and sell it.
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: So over the years, we've invested a lot in our enablement platform, which is centered around something we call JumpCloud University.
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: It's one hub for all of the resources that you need to enable your teams to be able to be successful with JumpCloud.
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: So there's multiple simulations, guided courses that are self-serve or can be instructor-led, depending on the situation.
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: We also have certifications that allow you to test your knowledge on JumpCloud and also prove it in situations where it's relevant.
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: In addition to that, we have a partner development program where we work with our partners to understand where they're at from a go-to-market perspective and support them in any way that we can in positioning the JumpCloud included value proposition within their sales pitch or within their campaigns.
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: So that involves one-on-one sessions with partner development managers, connecting them with marketing counterparts within the company, sharing different resources that can help them from videos, one-pagers, case studies, building case studies, recording podcasts with our partners, investing in in-person events alongside our partners and going to market with these partners.
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: So it's like the combination of all these things together that, I think, allows us to really work with our partners, regardless of the stage that they're at and their journey, to make them successful from a technical perspective, but also and arguably in some cases more importantly from a go-to-market perspective what's great there, right, as I think you're sort of working backwards or maybe forwards towards what the perfect partner is right from a sales perspective, from a technical perspective, um, do you feel like that?
• 12:33
  Speaker 2: you've seen real stories.
• 12:34
  Speaker 2: We were prepping before the call and I thought it was heartwarming to hear you talking about fostering sort of msp to msp relationships, that that you're building friendships.
• 12:42
  Speaker 2: I think the thing I love about the channel and I love when I hear people especially talking about smaller businesses right, some of these are small teams, mom and pop shops.
• 12:51
  Speaker 2: You are instrumentally changing their lives, right, if you're really able to help them grow and develop their business.
• 12:58
  Speaker 2: I'd love to hear maybe some of the feedback or some of the success stories that you've had in taking a partner from not knowing much about JumpCloud to it becoming a cool part of their business.
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, we have so many cases of that happening, you know, and it happens in, like you get into that zone from different angles.
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: It depends on where you're at in your journey as a partner and also like whether the timing's right and the chances that we've had to spend time with you.
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: As we were discussing before this recording, we started investing a lot this year in MSP roadshows across the US where we'd go from city to city and we'd invite some of our existing partners, some new partner prospects that we think could be a great addition to our partner program, and introduce them to JumpCloud and to other partner solutions that join us at these roadshows.
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: Now, as we were discussing, I think that this is one thing that you can get out of these events when you're a partner.
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: But the most important thing is the community building aspect, where I've seen in my own eyes MSPs meet at these events They've operated in the same city for years but were not introduced and these partners then building a relationship, like developing a strong relationship and helping each other continue to grow.
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: That's been genuinely awesome to hear.
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: I've seen this awesome to see.
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: I've seen this across multiple cities, across multiple partners, where I'd introduced two partners at an event and six months later I see them again somewhere else and they're together and they now have developed a very strong relationship.
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: They've helped each other out.
• 14:47
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's actually.
• 14:48
  Speaker 2: We sometimes give a bit of career advice here on the podcast and it's one of the things I really sort of hammer into young channel account managers or young marketing account managers who are trying to build their career in the channel, which is that's really how you get promoted and get new jobs in the channel, because we're all one big ecosystem, one big family, and that one that mantra never pissed anyone off.
• 15:10
  Speaker 2: But also make sure that you do build those real connections with people that maybe in the short term don't mean any revenue for you, right, it's just.
• 15:20
  Speaker 2: It's just a good thing to do, because from experiences, those relationships really pay off, right, whether you learn something, whether you're able to help someone else and it's and it's altruistic, or whether there's something cynical long-term down the line that can come from it.
• 15:32
  Speaker 2: I think that's the real power of the channel is how do you learn from each other, because that can positively impact both parties.
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: And it's great also knowing that there's other people that are in the same situation as you.
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: It can be hard being an MSP, for example, at times right Like being a business owner in general is hard, but when you're an MSP and you're struggling with specific things, like realizing that there's other people around you that have the same challenges or have had the same challenges and have overcome these challenges over time, is very comforting.
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: I'll give you an example.
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: I was in Atlanta a couple of weeks ago for one of these roadshow events that we were organizing.
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: It was an awesome event.
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: It was supposed to go from 11 to 1 or 1.30 pm.
• 16:17
  Speaker 1: We ended up staying for an additional hour, hour and a half on top of that.
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: We weren't talking about JumpCloud, necessarily.
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: We were just talking to each other about our own businesses, who's doing what, how they've overcome certain types of challenges, how they're thinking about the future and like.
• 16:36
  Speaker 1: It was an awesome conversation and I think that it was like the value that we got out of this conversation is really like very, very high, yeah, 100%.
• 16:48
  Speaker 2: I'm part of a few revenue leader communities and there's nothing more comforting than sort of walking into one of those sessions slightly panicked about what the hell is happening in your business, and you think you're on your own and unique and you hear someone just sort of chuckling and was like, yeah, I was there months ago and and this is how I handled it and or you're handling it much better than I would and and yeah, it is just stressful, right, like there is so much complexity and going out in the world and making great stuff happen that, um, that I imagine that brings you a lot of secondary benefits, right, you're helping your msps get through short-term challenges, right, which ultimately is helpful to you.
• 17:27
  Speaker 2: But I can imagine from a program perspective, from a loyalty perspective, that it's wildly valuable to sort of foster some of that softer stuff, and it's not just about rebates and MDF programs and everything else.
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: No, I mean, these are the mechanics that help make some of the engine works but, like, the engine has to be built on trust and a shared vision, and that's something that you cannot do through MDF and through channel, partner, tiers and any other mechanism that you have.
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: And that's where just human-to-human communication, transparency and obsession around a uh vision that we have are very important excellent, maybe into some more of the program pieces.
• 18:15
  Speaker 2: Um you, uh, you've launched a new program at jump cloud.
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: I'd love to understand what the biggest shifts are and why you made some of those changes yeah, I mean we, over the, we've grown our partner network tremendously and our partners are at all different stages of growth.
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: We have some partners that have just started their business and some other partners that have been in business for years and years and have seen many successes.
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: And what we were planning to do, what we plan to do when we re-imagined our partner program is look at these different partner journeys and create a new, revamped program that aligns with our partner's journeys, regardless of the stage that they're at.
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: So the new partner program is very simple.
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: It's four tiers, from member to platinum, and every tier has its own set of benefits that aligns with the stage at which the partners are, and these can range from market development funds to an appearance on our podcast, to joint case studies, joint press releases, access to leadership within our organization and dozens and dozens of other benefits, and the goal is to really continue to support our partners in continuing to build our shared journey together that's built on trust and a shared vision of the future.
• 19:37
  Speaker 2: It's amazing and excellent and, I think, very forward-thinking to hear a program that's so collaborative.
• 19:43
  Speaker 2: I'll be honest, when I uh, sometimes when I hear people go, oh so we've got a metal status, and I'm like, yeah, it's the same thing.
• 19:50
  Speaker 2: That's existed since you know, dell invented it in 1993 or whenever they first implemented it.
• 19:55
  Speaker 2: But you've mentioned in the recording but also previously, how much trust and feedback is sort of at the heart of your program.
• 20:03
  Speaker 2: How did you land on that?
• 20:06
  Speaker 2: Because that doesn't feel like a very obvious decision to make.
• 20:10
  Speaker 1: You know, it landed like when the time came to formalize it.
• 20:14
  Speaker 1: It came in naturally Because I think that over the years we've decided that we're going to be operating this way with full transparency and with full support of our partners.
• 20:25
  Speaker 1: Looking at the bigger picture of how we wanted to do things, even though we had the legacy program in place, we were operating already on the basis of a new program.
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: It was just not official.
• 20:34
  Speaker 1: So what we've done now is really officialize it, because a lot of our partners and a lot of partners out there did not know that this way of operating with us existed, and so when we did that, the excitement across our partner base went up very quickly and it allowed us to continue refining that program, which I think is going to continue being a living organism for years to come, because partner needs change, stages of growth, the stages of growth they're at adapt the market shifts.
• 21:08
  Speaker 1: We as a company evolve over time.
• 21:10
  Speaker 1: So I think that we're now we now have a very strong, modern foundation like more, like a adapted foundation that we're going to be able to continue tracking up as everything progresses awesome and Antoine.
• 21:25
  Speaker 2: So you've built an amazing foundation as we exit 2024.
• 21:29
  Speaker 2: What's 2025 and 2026 look like for you?
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: 2025 and 2026, I think.
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: From a product perspective, we're continuing to introduce new capabilities and are deepening some of our core capabilities.
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: As a matter of fact, we've just released a very exciting new functionality within the product called SaaS Management.
• 21:49
  Speaker 1: It's basically a new module that allows companies to detect shadow IT within their organizations and mitigate it by either blocking it warning users when they're accessing something that is not sanctioned or whitelisting it and unramping it into single sign-on, which improves the security.
• 22:09
  Speaker 1: So we're going to be adding some additional capabilities.
• 22:13
  Speaker 1: We're also going to be spending a lot of time deepening, continuing to deepen some of our existing capabilities and, from a partner program perspective, I think that we're going to continue rolling out this new partner program that launched recently and are going to continue adapting it to the different stages of growth that our partners are in us to increase their revenues, improve their margins and improve security with the help of the unification that JumpCloud provides around identity, access and device management, and also continuing to build that deep trust and shared vision that allows us to support each other at different stages of our groups.
• 23:03
  Speaker 2: Awesome.
• 23:03
  Speaker 2: In terms of extending partnerships, antoine.
• 23:06
  Speaker 2: We always like to ask our current guest who they think we should have on next.
• 23:10
  Speaker 2: Who do you have in mind?
• 23:12
  Speaker 1: You should, I think, speak to Jessica Rees from Checkpoint Security, if you haven't done so already.
• 23:17
  Speaker 2: Awesome, antoine.
• 23:18
  Speaker 2: It's been an absolute pleasure.
• 23:19
  Speaker 2: Thank you so much for coming on and, jessica, we're coming for you.
• 23:22
  Speaker 2: Thank you.